That Contract, Broken
by Atakiri Mizuyuki
Summary: According to their contract, Sebastian must serve Ciel as his butler and not allow him to die before his revenge is met. But Ciel is dead—which means Sebastian has failed his duties, and the contract broken. Sebastian will not stand for this—he has played this game too long. And deep in the Reaper Dispatch Society, Ciel isn't too interested in being dead, either. [NO SHIPS]
1. Prologue: That Alarm, Keening

Prologue: That Alarm, Keening

…

The sound that tore through the Reaper Dispatch Society was so awful Ronald Knox thought it would make his glasses shatter.

"Holy wow, what the hell is that?!" he shouted, clapping his hands over his ears. All around him others were doing the same, abandoning reports, spilling teacups, dropping papers and clutching their Deathscythes to the sides of their skulls—a Reaper never gave up a hold on their scythe, after all. A couple desks on, Eric Slingby, his arms crossed smugly behind his head, also crossed his ankles—with equal smugness—over his desk.

"Someone big's gonna die," he noted, glancing up at one of the speakers where the awful, shrieking alarm was coming from. Several desks to Knox's right, Alan Humphries' head whipped up.

"Eric!" he snapped, more annoyed than mad; he also had his hands clasped over his ears, though it clearly did none of them any good. Slingby snorted and folded his arms instead across his chest.

"What's the point in pretending otherwise?" he drawled over the shrieking of the siren. He wiggled his standard-issue black-gloved fingers at the speaker. "Even the freshmeat'll figure it out soon enough." He picked up his Deathscythe—a saw, Knox liked him (he was a partier) but a _saw_, come on, how unoriginal could you _get_—and waved it around a bit. Probably trying to look intimidating or something.

"That's nice, and what the hell's it supposed ta mean?!" Knox whined. "My hearin's gonna get fried and you _know_ the brass are too cheap to pay for a doc to look at 'em."

Humphries frowned—probably thinking that Knox was not alive and doctors wouldn't do him any good—but Slingby smirked.

"Means we're to stand down. Like I already said, someone _big's_ gonna get it, and they don't trust us little worker-ants to handle it right. We aren't even allowed to _look_ at our Lists in case we do something to screw it up." Knox's eyebrows pulled low over his yellow-green eyes.

"That's bloody stupid. For the first time in my life, I actually _wanna_ look at my List." The only thing that could get him to do overtime was when he wasn't allowed to be doing it. Slingby snorted—it sounded something like approval—and went back to leaning in his chair.

"Let the brass handle this one, kid," he advised. Humphries glanced up at him—he'd already returned to his paperwork—approvingly; Knox puffed his cheeks out like a petulant child.

"So what the hell's 'big' mean? Like, someone they actually think might _pass_ a Cinematic Record check?" he guessed. A female Reaper with cropped black hair and freckles sauntered past with a snort. Before he could retort to her smug smuginess—_arrogant little Irish banshee_—his senior was already speaking again.

"Nah. But someone important. 'Important', capital 'I'." Knox rolled his eye at Slingby's particularly unhelpful response.

"Someone whose death carries with it many stakes and consequences," Humphries offered from the other side of their cluster of desks. Slingby and Knox's expressions of surprise were nearly identical. "Someone who, for whatever reason, will create complications and difficulties for the RDS. The alarm is the notice that we need to stand down, to avoid a delicate situation. That's why we aren't allowed to look at our Lists—to ensure we stay out of what's going to happen." He blushed at his own flagrant rule-breaking and ducked his head back towards his papers. Knox knew he wouldn't get another word out of him—he spun around to Slingby, but Slingby had been entirely preoccupied with that rather impressive breach of character.

"What he said," he finished with a shrug. He climbed to his feet, citing something along the lines of needing coffee or he'd start reaping other Reaper, and sauntered away from his desk, saw Deathscythe in hand. Judging by the expression on Humphries' face as he did so, Knox assumed this was not something he was actually allowed to be doing.

He threw himself back in his chair, arms crossed behind his head and at his ankles and very smug, and let out an annoyed _tcheh_. Somewhere along the line he'd managed to not notice the alarm anymore, but then any time he even approached thoughts of it, fieldwork, or the List, it would suddenly be there again in full force, like a dagger to the ear canal. The paperwork he was supposed to be doing was completely fine, though.

Only a bureaucracy could come up with a trick _so very evil_.

"Why is it I only get saddled with the obnoxious jobs and none of the interesting ones?!" he demanded to anyone who was listening through the background shriek. He continued to sulk into his chair for a while and refused to touch any of his reports. On the principle of the thing.

…

William T. Spears knocked and waited for his summons before flinging the door open and rushing into the room.

"Madam, it can't—" he started, a sheaf of paper in his hand. He stopped short and stared in wordless shock at the head of the Reaper Dispatch Society. Magnolia Rosenthal adjusted her spectacles.

"It is precisely as it appears to be, Mr. Spears," she said, gesturing to the grand List lying open on her desk. It was not _the_ List, the original and absolute, but it was one of the oldest and finest copies, infallible, impeccable, and in the form of a leather-bound book about the size of a sleeping child.

Spears said nothing. Just stared. How this could possibly happen, how _it_ could possibly allow this to happen… He realized at that moment that it would _not_ allow this to happen. Madam Rosenthal nodded.

"You understand the situation, Mr. Spears," she said, brushing reddish hair back over her shoulder. "As you are the highest-ranking Dispatcher familiar with this situation, you and you alone will be charged with the collection of this soul. By any means necessary, Mr. Spears. There are many powers who would like to keep us from doing our job, but his name is on the list. It is already written. He will die—and I want to see his soul where it belongs. _Here_," she added with an intensity that seemed to shake the room.

Spears used his Deathscythe to adjust his own glasses before bowing low.

"Of course, Madam. I will fulfill my duty impeccably."

How, he wasn't totally sure. And he certainly hated to cross paths with vermin. But the idea of a challenge was… electrifying, if not positive.

He marched out of Madam Rosenthal's office after politely excusing himself and quietly shutting the door before dashing through the halls in a way that sent papers flying but not a single hair out of place.

…

**AUTHOR'S NOTE: **It… liiiiives! I actually wrote this chapter several days ago; far be it from me to delay in the posting of a thing, but here we go. This story will be many chapters. We'll see how many of them I actually get to before I run out of steam. (Your support keeps me going, ladies and gentlemen and distinguished guests!)

As Shuofthewind is both my lovely beta and one of my closest friends, I thought it'd be fun to throw in a cameo of one of her characters in here because there were a bunch of shinigami running around anyway. But apparently my original reference (that her snort had an Irish accent) was a little too implausible for her, and so the final wording was hers, not mine. (hahahaha P.S. SHU I KNOW SNORTS CAN'T HAVE IRISH ACCENTS THAT WAS THE JOKE) Of course of course, a thousand thank yous to her for her patience and willingness to work with an idiot like me. Ilu.

My eternal thanks to all who have read this!


	2. Chapter 1: That Earl, Cold

Chapter 1: That Earl, Cold

…

"Dammit, Sebastian," Ciel spat, as if this was all his butler's fault, as a bullet whined over his head, clipped the edge of a wooden shipping crate, and sent shards of wood spinning into the air. Sebastian smiled at him, that smug, condescending look that drew his mouth into an obnoxious little 'v' shape and made him close his dried-blood eyes.

"My apologies, my lord. I had not realized there would be quite so many." There were nearly eighty voices clamoring from the far end of the alley, moaning and shouting and cursing and predominantly male. This kind of work seemed to attract destitute males more than other genders.

A pistol—an entire pistol—spun through the air after the bullet and made Ciel _chortle_.

"I believe they may be running out of bullets," he noted drily. That obnoxious smile appeared again on his butler's face, and the man—demon, calling him a 'man' even however fleetingly was laughable and absurd—rested a hand upon his chest and inclined his head.

"Shall I begin then, my lord?" Ciel gave an equally condescending scoff and, with a deeper bow of his head, Sebastian vanished from around the box.

There was a loud chorus of _BANGS_ and the bark of guns, and then the gentle chuckle of Sebastian Michaelis.

Than a piercing scream and a wet crunching sound.

Ciel peeked over the top of the crate, his pistol gripped in one hand and the other steadying it, the eye not under the white medical patch darting about the alleyway to take the situation in.

Sebastian was tearing—quite literally, Ciel had to not think about it—his way into the heart of their numbers, and there really were eighty of them, ragged and unkempt but large and strong, the best this syndicate could gather. They looked ragtag, disparate mercenaries and not a single, cohesive fighting unit. That would certainly make things easier for the Queen's forsaken House and the pitch-black butler who followed him to damnation.

Ciel turned away from the action—blood, violence, murder did not bother him much, but he'd never quite had the stomach for the things Sebastian could _do_—and found the door to the hideout tucked against the right side of the alley, an abnormally short, empty frame among the bricks. According to the blueprints he'd received from Lau (who'd smiled broadly as he recounted how he'd gathered the blueprints from a business associate he was not particularly fond of and had been delighted to quite literally string along), that way was a back one into the shipping warehouse where this group moved its stock—children, children from every place where the sun shone on the empire of England, an empire where the sun never set. What happened to them was as varied as the places they came from (though, Lau had assured him with the disturbing smile behind which he hid all of his true thoughts, not in correlation).

But the "why" and "for what" hardly changed the fact that these people were abducting, abusing, and trafficking children, pronounced by the Kingdom of Britain a crime and something that greatly displeased Her Majesty, the Queen Victoria.

It quite displeased Ciel, too. That was why Victoria's pretty, unsigned letter had come to him.

Far be it from him to say anything negative about the queen, but in his head he sometimes really couldn't stand the woman.

Sebastian kicked one man in the head, and his neck nearly snapped one-hundred-eighty degrees. He stumbled, fell to one knee, achingly pulled himself back up. Ciel scowled, releasing a tiny _tch_, and checked the barrel in his pistol. Those far-fetched, conspiracy rumors might have some truth in them after all—the numbers of children bought and sold differed because a certain number of them were retained by the syndicate for the purposes of genetic experimentation. These men were too old to be the subjects—just profitters, then, not the guinea pigs but the beta testers, not the ones who suffered for these discoveries, just the ones there to reap the benefits and test the risks before the finalized discoveries moved on to the elites.

Ciel thought of Finny—at this moment probably dreaming of the beautiful tulips he had planted the day before that would likely never actually survive his care—and got _angry_.

"Sebastian! This is an order!" he shouted over the sounds of men dying. Sebastian spared a half-glance over his shoulder before performing a back-flip out of a genetically-enhanced man's punch—the evidence was in the way his fist whistled as it split the air around it with its speed. Not exactly undivided attention, but acknowledgement that Sebastian was listening. "I want them _dead_! Leave one for questioning, but kill the rest without exception or distraction!"

In the silvery nightlight in the alley, Ciel could see Sebastian's fangs glint.

"As you wish, my Lord," he purred. His feet caught on the underside of an overhang and he used it to launch himself towards the cobblestones, impeccably white-gloved claws reaching for arteries and soft places.

Ciel leapt to his feet at the same time, his pistol jumping and snapping, _1-2-3-4-5-6. _He ducked back behind the crates without waiting to see how many he'd hit—there was no doubt that he _had_ hit—and listened with half an ear to the shouts, screams, and gurgles as he fished out additional ammo from his pocket and rammed them into the revolving barrel of his favorite gun.

When he lifted himself above the crate again—this time with both elbows propped on the wood in a sniper's position—the number of bodies on the floor of the alley did not make any sense. He'd dropped two—he could see the steaming bullet holes in their foreheads and the dripping blood—and they were most certainly not alone among their sprawled companions. But there weren't very many of them. There had been about eighty of them at the start, judging by Ciel's own estimations and Sebastian's senses, and at least sixty of them had to still be standing. Maybe even sixty-five. Especially in such tight quarters, their numbers should have been dropped _at least_ to half by now, and that was if they were _skilled_. And Ciel knew immediately that, if they were not entirely normal thugs, they were at least certainly not trained.

"Sebastian, what are you doing?!" Ciel roared, firing another bullet into the ear of a man who had started to turn to him at the sound of his voice. "Don't play around!"

Sebastian's fingers wrapped around a man's head, crushed it, and ripped it off its shoulders. The rest of the body started to fall, and with a swift kick Sebastian sent it back into one of the other thugs, who stumbled.

"My apologies, young master," Sebastian called, voice hardly unruffled. Ciel arched an eyebrow. He sounded _annoyed_. "They're a bit more _sturdy_ than we had thought them." A man whose shirt had already been ripped apart by the hard edges of Sebastian's uniform shoes was rushing at him again, a wooden club in his hands. Sebastian's face twisted into an expression of distaste. "They still have the same simple, animal minds of adults even while they have the strength of things much greater."

Ciel fired his gun at a man lunging for Sebastian's throat with a knife, taking careful aim so the bullet left a slash in Sebastian's cheek. Sebastian glanced back at him for a single moment, fuchsia, slit-pupiled eyes glowing with intense annoyance, before he went back to the fight.

"I don't care what you think of them! You have your orders; all but one dead, no distractions! Don't make me repeat myself!" He fired again and caught a man in the throat; but he only stumbled and spun around to face Ciel. Sebastian—thinking better of commenting that his young master had, in fact, just repeated himself—caught the man before he could break away, his sharp fingers sliding right into the hole Ciel had opened into his throat, and yanked him back. The man gurgled and cursed both the Guard Dog and his bitch with his frayed vocal chords. With a flick of his wrist Sebastian broke the man's neck and let him drop to the ground.

He dove into another man and tore at the ribcage under his skin. The man shrieked as his ribs were wrenched apart.

There were a few gunshots headed for Ciel's direction, and he ducked back behind the crate. He was being ignored, for now, but he was not forgotten. Neither were their guns, apparently, though to Ciel's best guess few of them had them, as most were focused on trying to bludgeon Sebastian or cut him with secreted knives. Ciel lifted himself over the crate and rapid-fired the last three bullets in his barrel randomly into the cloud of the fight; he dropped immediately, but not after several bullets had been returned at him, crashing into and shattering crates all around him. That had been his plan, to draw their fire, waste their bullets—but one had caught the tip of his ear, and he hissed in pain as he tested the bloody tip with his own gloved fingers.

"Young master?!" Sebastian cried; of course, even over the noise of bones breaking and men shouting the demon could hear something as fine as a gasp.

"_No distractions!_" Ciel bellowed, ignoring the blood and refitting bullets into his pistol.

The sound of the men, and the bullets, and the violence all dipped for one brief, breath's-length of a moment, the kind of strange coincidence that could exist only in a game as unruly and messy as reality; just long enough for Ciel to hear Sebastian _chuckle_ at him.

Ciel fired another distracting shot over the top of the crate, then threw himself into the center of the alley as he rolled away from his hiding place. He rolled right to his feet, steadied his gun in both hands, and fired three quick shots into the crowd. He threw himself to the other side and scrabbled behind another crate as only a small handful of bullets whizzed by. They were starting to sound more like buzzing bees than actual attacks. They were out of bullets, now, or at least very nearly. But they weren't out of men. Ciel swallowed a scowl as he considered the bullets in his pocket and the ineffectiveness of his butler. Clearly some of the men had received more extensive strength manipulations than the others, but that was still only an excuse for his butler's poor display.

He fired his last two shots over the crates to draw fire—the return shots _thunk-thunk-thunked_ into the crate in front of the one he hid behind—and once more refilled his gun. He only had one more round after this; he'd have to save the rest of the bullets for self-defense; Sebastian had been successful in both keeping the men from escaping as well as from catching any who decided to try their luck with the smaller prey and broke off, but he could certainly not count on Sebastian to catch every single one, especially if he'd _still_ only felled thirty of them.

His gun filled, Ciel darted back into the center of the alley again, taking careful but rapid aim into the group of men, trying to find those in the best and least-touched condition, those that might be hardest to drop. He squeezed them off in rounds of two, sinking the bullets directly into temples and foreheads. _1-2, 3-4-, 5—_

His finger faltered as a silver note of pain rang from the top of his leg and up to the very crown of his head. _ Dammit_. It was followed by a flash of heat, a flash of white. _DAMMIT_. Then Ciel shoved the sensation away, forced himself to breathe again, and fired his last shot. But the trigger only _clicked_ uselessly; he'd squeezed off the last shot after all, though it had been in his distraction from the pain. He couldn't begin to guess where that bullet might have gone, then—certainly not into a target.

The following instant he was back behind another crate, his chest hammering and his breath fast. Dammit, dammit, _dammit_…

"_YOUNG MASTER!" _Sebastian yelled, more angry than alarmed. Ciel scowled and pressed his hands over the gunshot wound, where he was already starting to bleed.

"I'm fine!" he barked, gritting his teeth the next moment as he pressed with all his weight to staunch the bleeding. Stupid. Stupid, cocky, and foolish. He'd thought they'd been out of bullets, he'd thought he'd had time—_stupid_. He glanced down at the spot where he'd been shot. The bullet hadn't stuck in him; it had shot right past, gouging deep but not even crossing his skin with its full width.

They'd—to Ciel's intense embarrassment—hit him right at the inner-top of his thigh; if it had shifted even half a centimeter, he would have lost a strictly unnecessary, but very important part of his body. He pressed his teeth together again—having to let Sebastian look at it later would be unbelievably awkward and unpleasant, the thought was already agony—and pressed down harder with his hands. Blood was pouring out in quantities that would have alarmed any other thirteen year-old in the world, deep and dark and very hot. Steam was curling from between his fingers and off the drops on the damp cobblestones in the cold, late-Autumn air.

"Young master…" Sebastian called again, in the brief space between the _snap_ of a broken neck and the _crack_ of a broken spine.

"Just a flesh wound, it's nothing!" Ciel assured him. There were footsteps charging in his direction—they were suddenly cut off, with a _whoosh_ of air and a yelp of alarm and a sickening _thud _as one of them was thrown against a building twenty feet back from the center of the melee.

Ciel was not stupid. He knew there were more important things set near his hips than the kinds of things most people focused on. Things like arteries.

But Ciel was certain they could not have clipped his femoral artery. The luck required for that… No. Situations like this were not about luck. Their aim had been poor—poor enough that though they had undoubtedly been aiming for either his chest or his kneecap, they'd scraped his hip. The femoral artery was closer to the center of the body, he was certain of it, higher up. The fact that the bullet had only grazed him—deeply, but still, a surface wound—without taking out a full chunk of his flesh had to mean that it was a flesh wound. It didn't even hurt that badly—and he'd received enough gunshots to know. He was bleeding. Not bleeding out.

"Young master, I can _taste_ your blood—" Sebastian insisted; Ciel did not like the unmistakable and unrestrainable hunger in his voice. Maybe it wasn't his blood or his flesh the demon wanted to consume, but Ciel knew any scent of vulnerability could make his unflappable butler very distractable.

"_Your orders, Sebastian!_" Ciel barked. Sebastian scowled, but with another fanciful pirouette allowed one man to punch another, then smashed their heads together with such force their skulls caved inwards.

"Then, _my lord_," Sebastian spat with unhidden contempt, "kindly go secret yourself away from the fight to prevent any further _distractions_." Ciel scowled, but knew Sebastian was right; he needed to be much further away then twenty feet. He glanced at the space between his legs where his dark gloves—darker in the dim silverlight with blood that still burbled up between his fingers—pressed against his wound. It was in an awkward spot—more than just societally awkward. Would he be able to walk with this? He could hardly walk and apply pressure to it at the same time unless he wanted to waddle along like a duck with its tail feathers in the air. But he could also hardly tell Sebastian that he was incapable of walking. Ciel's orders were absolute. That was part of their contract. It was also in their contract that Sebastian serve Ciel faithfully, to never lie to him, never to betray him, and never to allow him to die before he had had his revenge. If Ciel had—in his own stupidity—sustained a wound so critical it prevented him from walking, Sebastian's need to preserve Ciel's life would supersede Ciel's order that every thug of this trafficking syndicate be caught and made very, very dead. Sebastian would abandon the fight, would spirit Ciel home, and the thugs that were left would scatter, flee, _continue to live_. And Ciel would not allow that. Human traffickers, child abusers had no place in any world in which he drew breath. Let alone Her Majesty's empire.

He'd lose blood in the transit, but that was alright if he was quick, wasn't it? It was just a surface wound, he'd bled much worse and for much longer before.

"Hold them!" Ciel barked. The sounds of the melee intensified. But he could still hear Sebastian's reply over them.

"Yes, my lord."

Ciel shifted uncomfortably to his feet; blood spattered out of the hole in his leg in thick gops. A wave of light-headedness swept over him. A tidal force of hard-headedness propelled him forward.

He walked with a proud, though awkward, gait down the alley, as quickly as he could, one hand pressed tight against the top of his thigh. Dammit. _ Fuck_. He was an idiot. Sebastian would chew him out for this, later, contractor or not. Especially because he was prioritizing Sebastian's attention to the fight and away from him. Oh well. He'd dealt with worse.

He had a melted patch of skin on his back to prove it.

He fell back against a wall of the alley some hundred yards away and slid down. He grimaced and pressed his other hand back over the wound. He couldn't be sure—he'd never had a proper look at it, after all, he was not so stupid that he would lift his hands and remove the pressure for something as self-indulgent as a peek—but he thought it was still bleeding as badly as it had before. Shouldn't it have abated by now? Didn't matter. A little blood was a little blood. He'd probably lost two lifetimes' worth of blood by now in different scraps and scrapes.

He shivered and hunched into his shoulders, cursing his dead-night scuffle, this unseasonable chill that had marked all of this later part of the Autumn. He was steaming, from the blood over his gloves and the sweat standing out on the back of his neck.

He was pressing down with both hands, but his gun was still wrapped tight in his left fist. He'd had to move it when he walked, as the bullet had clipped his right thigh, but he had certainly not let go of it, and he wouldn't for the world. Bleeding or not, he would not be left without a way to defend himself.

He closed his eyes and focused on bearing all his weight down on the gash in his thigh. Stupid, stupid stupid. He would not let this indignity pass unpunished. He would take out every smirk, chastisement, and condescending remark Sebastian gave him on the syndicate Head as soon as they had them before letting them feel the full might of Sebastian's true form.

God, Sebastian would be utterly insufferable for the next weeks. With his constant snickering, his smug smirks, his annoyed sighs and disgruntled glances every time he had to change Ciel's bandages, the completely indiscreet delight he would take in Ciel's discomfort at the places he would have to touch (it wasn't the seeing—Sebastian bathed him, after all, but the _touching_), his 'harmless' and 'unintentional' double entendres, the _unceasing_ lectures that he should have known better, he should have dodged, he shouldn't have offered himself as a target, he should have been more aware, if he was still a little child who could not handle the situation he should have stayed out of it.

Damn him. Damn that useless, infuriating butler. He'd finally taught the demon how to make a half-decent pot of tea, but he hadn't been able to get any manners in him.

He was the Queen's guard dog for God's sake, an Earl of the British Empire, the least he could expect was servants who knew their place, right? At _least _ones who knew their tea, if nothing else.

There was a clatter, and his eyes darted open. It took him a moment—a very slow, heavy moment—to realize the sound had been his gun falling from his limp hand and onto the cobblestones. His eyebrows came together, pinching his forehead, and he grabbed it. He grab—He—

His arm wasn't moving.

He tried again, and again, and again… and again... and… an…

He could make out movement in the half-light, subtle, but there. The pool of blood that had gathered beneath his right leg, shimmering, disturbed only by the steady of stream of blood that added to it. He couldn't feel the leg anymore. He was cold, very cold, but he wasn't shivering.

He let his eyelids fall under the weight of his own stupidity.

He'd been wrong. He was wrong. He had been so certain that it couldn't have happened, so certain that it _hadn't_. Not to a person who had survived the burning of his parents, being abducted, branded, abused, beaten, starved, stabbed, who had found the strength to call the ultimate power to his side, to control it, who had fought and suffered ceaselessly from that time. Such a person would not die from so mundane a cause as blood-loss. Such a person would not be accidentally clipped by a random bullet in a skirmish against underlings in an unimportant case. Such a person would not die because that random bullet had found his femoral artery.

He did not, of course, have the strength to laugh.

Not bleeding, bleeding out. And he had been for a while. Even his breaths were shallow under his numb skin. Cold. He was cold. He couldn't feel anything.

He tried to open his eyes, but he couldn't. Stay conscious. He had to stay awake. Even if his eyes had fallen, even if it made it a hundred-thousand times more difficult, he had to stay awake, stay conscious. He would not die here. Queen's Guard Dog, Evil Noble, Demon's Contractor. Sebastian would realize, would come to him, would scoop him away and somehow make things better.

If anyone could steal him away from death, it would be the demon that had saved him from his first murder. No human hand could stop the flowing of a femoral artery.

But Sebastian was one hell of a butler.

He was cold. It was very cold. Even the steam from his blood wasn't rising anymore.

He knew it was useless. He already knew it was useless. But he still tried to open his mouth, to call. 'Sebastian'. But the voice wouldn't come. The words wouldn't sound, his lips wouldn't even open. Dammit. Did he really have to call for him out loud? Could he really only signal his distress by saying it out loud, by removing his eye patch, by calling for him? But he couldn't call for him. He could only lie there, and try to hang on as his life trickled out of a hole in the side of his leg.

Could Sebastian really, _really_ not know that his lord was _dying_? Ciel had ordered Sebastian to ignore distractions—a wound was one thing, a bullet hole was one thing, but _dying_? That couldn't be the case (he was so cold), Sebastian had to be able to tell. To know. He'd sworn it. He'd sworn it, he'd sworn it, he'd sworn… He… Sebastian could not let Ciel die before he had his revenge. That was their contract. What bound them together (he couldn't feel his body). That was… No. Ciel couldn't die. Not until he'd… Not without… Not…

His…

_Sebastian…_

_ Se… bas… tian…_

_ S…_

He was tired. Cold. Very cold. And heav…y. Heavy. He was… He was tired… So… After all this time, just… tired… Of fighting… suffering… breath…ing… wa…king… Cold. Sl…

… ee…

… py…

So…

But there was something hurting in the back of his heart, hurting and pleading and screaming and crying.

_**SEBASTIAN!**_

…

Sebastian whipped around, fuchsia eyes flashing, slit-pupils riveting right on the spot of the soundless pathetic cry, the limp hand and the forsaken gun and the shine of blood.

"_YOUNG MASTER!" _he screamed, the shriek tearing out his throat.

He rocketed forward like a bullet, shredding a hole through everything in his path as he flew over the trail of thick, spattered blood that led from Ciel's first hiding place to his last. Towards his lord, his master, his contractor, his plaything, his playmate, the only interesting thing in his hellishly long life, his _meal_.

He reached out for him, reddened white gloves extended before him, tearing through flesh, through bones, rending bodies to tatters and splitting the very air so it screamed like he did.

A gloved-hand wrapped around the top of Ciel Phantomhive's collar. The fabric was black.

Sebastian let out a territorial scream, fury and rage and frustration and threat and _hunger_ as he flew faster, streaking through the keening air as he propelled himself forward with every shred of speed his demonic powers allowed. But he had already lost any chance of being the first to reach his prize.

Far was it from William T. Spears to cross paths with vermin without showing his distaste, but now was not the time for it. He had come knowing how nearly impossible his task would be, swiping a soul right from the claws of its bound demon. He knew _precisely_ the stakes in place, here, balanced so precariously upon the shoulders of this rather tiny, rather dead thirteen year-old child.

He grabbed the body of Ciel Phantomhive and _fled_. No time to use his Deathscythe, no time to watch the Cinematic Record and check what he already knew—the last of the Phantomhives was not someone with the potential to better the world; he could only bring it to ruin. No time for that at all. Certainly not with a shrieking demon reaching with his claws for the Reaper's ankle, his form only vaguely human, eyes burning white with uneven edges like holes in reality through the depths of a shape blacker than sin.

The thing flying towards him was still screaming.

William T. Spears fled the one direction he could—_up_. Straight up into the air, running at the same time as if up an immense staircase, the limp body of the boy tucked hastily under one arm.

The inhuman screaming—keening—shrieking—tearing—rending—whining-crying was not intelligible, but it had a sort of shape to it. A shape like:

_YOU WILL NOT TAKE WHAT IS MINE!_

The thing that was once called Sebastian Michaelis swept out with a clawed hand, long, thin, sharp, amorphous, exaggerated. For a brief moment, William T. Spears' still heart gave an uncomfortable _thump_.

The demon missed.

William T. Spears was now forty feet in the air and two hundred yards away, out of the range of the screaming, thrashing, _tantruming_ thing below him.

But still—he ran. And he did not look back and he did not slow down.

…

**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** Chapter 2 is written, but I'm going to sit on it a little bit before posting it; in the hopes of attracting readers (coughs) and maybe giving myself some buffer to actually work on chapters (?) I'm going to try and put space between udpates. How long it'll be between, I have no idea. I thank you in advance for your patience (and interest!). [[Shoutout again to lovely Shuofthewind, who beta'd all but the couple lines I had to squeeze in here after her feedback because I forgot I had edits to apply; oops]]


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